Washington Post: Bribing Students: Another ‘Magical Solution’ That Doesn’t Work

A Cincinnati high school’s recent program to pay students to attend class and to follow school rules is another example. It’s the latest in a series of unfortunate efforts to use bribery to force students to learn.

Application of these kinds of incentives has been proven time and time again to produce the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice Effect.” Listen to Professor Edward Deci, widely considered the most respected researcher in the field of motivation:

“It is easy to get people to do things by paying them if you’ve got enough money and they’ve got the necessary skills,” he said. “But they will keep doing it only as long as you keep paying them. And even if they were doing it before, when you stop paying them the behavior drops to a lower level than when you started paying them. We’ve done thousands of experiments on this over 40 years and the data is incredibly robust.”